Bruce’s List: A guide to informed reads.
As most of the country prepares to not listen to President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address this evening (the fun is due to start at 7pm by the way) There is a curious side issue that I have a sort of stake in. Attentive readers of Business Day and the Financial Mail will know by now that a press conference had been arranged for last Monday at which the announcement would be made that all the parties at Nedlac had finally agreed on the introduction of a minimum wage, next year, of R20/hour or R3,500/month for a 40-hour week. Then, at the very last moment, Cosatu, the ANC aligned union federation, pulled out of the signing ceremony (though I understand its signature is already on all the vital documents) claiming it needed to consult some part of its complicated innards. Whatever the excuse was, it was probably rubbish. The process towards this agreement has been going on for years.
But if it was rubbish, the question then is why? On our weekly TV programme on BusinessDay TV, Editing Allowed, yesterday (and every Wednesday at 8:30pm on DStv channel 412!), we had an argument about it. Business Day editor Tim Cohen and BusinessLIVE Rand Daily Mail editor Ray Hartley seemed to agree that Cosatu had withdrawn so as to deprive Zuma of the opportunity of being able to make the deal the cornerstone of his speech tonight. Cosatu has already come out in support of Cyril Ramaphosa to succeed Zuma as ANC leader later this year and Ramaphosa has been the lead government negotiator on the minimum wage. But Zuma could not be allowed to claim it as his victory on this Very Big Night.
I was not so sure. The head of Cosatu, S’dumo Dlamini, is a Zuma supporter, even though not many people around him are. I suspected that, in fact, the small but no doubt well-looked-after pro-Zuma clique had engineered what will probably just be a delay in the signing process, in order not to give Ramaphosa the victory he authentically deserves. Instead their aim was to enable Zuma fully to enjoy not only the limelight of the speech in parliament, but a large gathering the ANC has arranged for him directly afterwards, not too far from the National Assembly. So I was really pleased to see Business Day’s political editor, Natasha Marrian, saying the same thing in another great column today. I’m sure she’s right.
Meanwhile, wow, in this week’s edition of the Financial Mail, deputy editor Sikonathi Mantshantsha has written a humdinger of an exposé of the rotten state of Eskom. Do not miss this stuff and I am sure there’ll be more to come. It is written around a report by a law firm, Dentons, which conducted a short and incomplete investigation into the original load-shedding. What they found before being shut down by Eskom was pretty horrific. And this was long before Brian Molefe arrived, later to be skewered by former public protector Thuli Madonsela for much the same thing. Eskom was always the most completely captured institution in the state’s arsenal. It is a money machine, a patronage machine and a deeply corrupted generator of electricity. Read this and weep.
Over in the US, President Donald Trump’s actual mental health is increasingly the subject of some serious discussion. He can’t pay attention, tweeting about his daughter being treated unfairly by a department store chain in the middle of an intelligence briefing. He watches television all the time and recently called his national security adviser, a soldier, to ask which was better for America, a weak dollar or a strong one. So much for the businessman as leader. He won’t finish a term.
The one thing Trump and Zuma have in common is an admiration for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin last year played a decisive geopolitical hand in the Middle East when he upstaged the Obama administration by intervening militarily to support the Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, with the Russian air force, in the process flattening Aleppo and killing many innocent people. Now it appears that before Putin finally had his back killing Syrians in Aleppo, Assad had been extremely busy killing citizens in a prison north of Damascus. In all, reckons Amnesty International, Assad’s thugs beat and killed 13,000 citizens in the prison between 2011 and 2015. You can’t hide massacres. We’re going to buy a nuclear reactor from the guy who helped the guy who did this. Here, in more detail, is a look inside Assad’s killing field.
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